MFG 479 Students,

For those that are planning on entering the Business Plan Competition, they are holding a workshop to help generate ideas for a business or refine your current idea.

Thursday @ 7pm
W310 TNRB

See bpc.byu.edu for more info.

Fundraising Panel Monday Oct. 26

MFG479 Students,

We have a tremendous fundraising panel for next Monday's class! Here is who is coming - look them up on Google and be ready with your questions:

Entrepreneur currently seeking financing for the first time - Alan Martin, CampusBookRentals.com (confirmed)

• Entrepreneur who has successfully raised money - Ryan Caldwell, EnticeLabs (confirmed)
  
Angel Investor - Kyle Love, UtahAngels (confirmed)
Venture Debt Investor - Damon Kirschmeier, Innoventures (confirmed)
Venture Capitalist - Greg Warnock, venture capital/private equity (confirmed)

The format will be that each panelist will have 3-5 minutes to share a little bit about their role in the venture ecosystem. After each panelist gives a quick rundown, then we will open it up for Q&A.

- Prof Richards

Exam 1 Stats

MFG479 Students,

Prof. Richards asked me to announce the stats for the first exam.

Exam 1

MIN	40
MAX	96
MEAN	74.5

- John Jr, TA

BYU Business Plan Competition Kickoff Tomorrow!

MFG479 Students,

The BYU Business Plan Competition Kickoff Event is tomorrow!

The business plan you are preparing in your class is EXACTLY what the BPC is looking for. There is no cost to enter besides your time. The resources the competition offers can also help improve your class business plan while preparing it for the competition. Check out http://bpc.byu.edu for more information on eligibility, registration and a schedule of events.


Come learn how to turn your idea into a successful business. Enjoy free pizza and your chance to win an iPod Touch or Nintendo Wii. Come back the next day for our first idea workshop to find out how to get your idea going.

Kick Off Event
Wednesday, Oct 21^st
6:30 PM (doors open at 6PM)
3220 WSC

On Thursday there will also be a workshop for those that still need an idea for their team or want to refine their idea. Those that attend the workshops and use all the offered resources do a lot better in the competition than others.

Idea Workshop - Find A Winning Business Idea
Thursday, Oct 22^nd
11:00 AM
3223 WSC

Engineering Startup Event -- Today!

Free event today! See attached image for more information.

Free Intellectual Property Seminar

As part of the Utah Student 25 (www.UtahStudent25.com) event, a leading intellectual property law firm, Bateman IP Law Group, is holding a FREE seminar on intellectual property protection for start up and emerging entrepreneurial ventures. This is a unique opportunity only being made available due to Bateman's tremendous support of the Utah Student 25 event.

Please attend. The attached flyer has the details. It is on two nights, one in Orem and the other in SLC. Free Dinner, too! But, it's limited to the first 25 who RSVP by calling 801-533-0320.

- Prof John Richards

Grades Updated

MFG 479 Students,

Grades have been posted, including the assignments turned in on Wednesday. If you notice an error or have a question about your grades please send an email to mfg479@gmail.com.

- John Jr, MFG479 TA

To: Creating New Ventures students

Sharing how my reading of the daily newspaper leads to ideas ...

This industry is begging for a Napster, YouTube, something that will provide a legal but cool way of handling e-books. There are probably many ancillary ideas that could come from this dilemma. Who will do it? Why not you?

Read this article ...

- Prof. Richards

October 4, 2009

Digital Domain

Will Books Be Napsterized?

By RANDALL STROSS

YOU can buy “The Lost Symbol,” by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com.

Or you can don a pirate’s cap and snatch a free copy from another online user at RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.

Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of free-for-the-taking copies did not much matter. But e-books won’t stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens. So, too, are computer tablets that can serve as giant e-readers, and hardware that will not be very hard at all: a thin display flexible enough to roll up into a tube.

With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder’s permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

The book industry has not received cheery news for a while. Publishers and authors alike have relied upon sales of general-interest hardcover books as the foundation of the business. The Association of American Publishers estimated that these hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent in 2008, versus the previous year. This year, these sales were down 15.5 percent through July, versus the same period of 2008. Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remained small, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.

“We are seeing lots of online piracy activities across all kinds of books — pretty much every category is turning up,” said Ed McCoyd, an executive director at the association. “What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy’s a big concern.”

Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, said: “Everybody in the industry considers piracy a significant issue, but it’s been difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem. We know people post things but we don’t know how many people take them.”

We do know that people have been helping themselves to digital music without paying. When the music industry was “Napsterized” by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn’t recovered. Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of the industry’s inflation-adjusted sales in the United States, even including sales from Apple’s highly successful iTunes Music Store, has dropped by more than half, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

A report earlier this year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, based on multiple studies in 16 countries covering three years, estimated that 95 percent of music downloads “are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers.”

Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland. It says its customers have uploaded onto its servers more than 10 petabytes of files — that’s more than 10 million gigabytes — and can handle up to three million users simultaneously. Anyone can upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free. RapidShare does not list the files — a user must know the impossible-to-guess U.R.L. in order to download one.

But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the U.R.L. and a description somewhere online, like a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.

“As far as we can tell, RapidShare is the largest host site of pirated material,” Mr. McCoyd said. “Some publishers are saying half of all infringements are linked to it.”

When I asked Katharina Scheid, a spokeswoman for RapidShare, if the company had a general sense of what kinds of material were most often placed on its servers — music? videos? other kinds of content? — she said she could not say because “for us, everything is just a file, no matter what.”

At my request, Attributor, a company based in Redwood City, Calif., that offers publishers antipiracy services, did a search last week to see how many e-book copies of “The Lost Symbol” were available free on the Web. After verifying that each file claiming to be the book actually was, Attributor reported that 166 copies of the e-book were available on 11 sites. RapidShare accounted for 102.

Ms. Scheid said her company complied with publishers’ take-down requests. But the request must refer to a particular file and use the specific U.R.L.; it’s left to the publishers to find all instances of a given book title on RapidShare’s servers. (I can report that RapidShare acted promptly in September when my publisher, Simon & Schuster, asked it to remove an audiobook version of one of my own books and provided the U.R.L. for the one file.) According to Ms. Scheid, the company gets requests to remove about 1 to 2 percent of the files that are uploaded daily.

To protect users’ privacy, however, she said RapidShare does not attempt to block the uploading of infringing material in the first place: “We don’t do content filtering; we don’t look into uploaded files.” Once a file is removed, the company tries to keep perfectly identical files from being uploaded again, but she listed various ways that determined users can alter the files just enough to effectively circumvent these measures. (My book reappeared on RapidShare a few days after it was taken down.) Hotfile and Megaupload did not respond to requests for comment.

RapidShare and fellow online storage services say that their services help users share large files easily or store personal data without having to carry around a memory stick. On the F.A.Q.’s page of its Web site, Megaupload depicts its customers as the most ordinary of citizens: “Students, professional business people, moms, dads, doctors, plumbers, insurance salesmen, mortgage brokers, you name it.”

Publishers and authors are about the only groups that go unmentioned. Ms. Scheid, of RapidShare, has advice for them if they are unhappy that her company’s users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself “by giving away most of their content for free.”

I will forward the suggestion along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers.

First Social Venture Start-up Group

MFG479 Students,

Interested in launching a social venture?

Looking to join a team with an amazing idea to change the world?

No clue what a social venture is...but interested in making a difference and money at the same time?!

Then come join us for our First Social Venture Start-up Group meeting!!!

Date and Time: Tuesday, October 6th @ 7pm

Location: W110 Tanner Building

Agenda: Introduction to social entrepreneurship and social ventures, guest lectures by successful BYU social entrepreneurs, and networking to start forming social venture teams...!

Bonus: Food will be provided!

Social ventures are built on the idea that we can use business to solve social issues--and make money while we're at it! In short--social ventures fall at the intersection of capitalism and altruism--wanting to do something good and still make a living while you're at it. Business is one of the most powerful forces in the world, and when we apply business principles and skills to issues like poverty alleviation, healthcare, water shortages, and environmental sustainability--there is the potential for tremendous social impact.

BYU students have a long history of entrepreneurship--with a fantastic Business Plan Competition and incredibly successful student start-ups. We believe that BYU students can combine this entrepreneurial spirit and talent with our desire to do good, and come up with game-changing ideas to solve our world's most pressing problems.

Come check out our meeting this Tuesday and begin to get plugged into the social venture landscape. Our purpose is to help you become a part of a social venture and to launch that venture successfully. For more information, take a look at these incredible social entrepreneurs and their ideas on how to make a huge difference:

VisionSpring: http://www.visionspring.org/about/our-story.php

D.Light Design: http://www.dlightdesign.com/

Virgance: http://www.virgance.com/about.php (**Note: 2 BYU students interned here last summer and had a ROCKIN' time! And 6 BYU students are doing an on-campus internship with Virgance this semester! We are working hard to get you plugged in to this space--reach out and we'll get you connected!)

Feel free to reach out with any questions, and we look forward to seeing you all on Tuesday night!

Students for Social Entrepreneurship

Students.For.SocEnt@gmail.com

801.636.6686 OR 801.319.4944